Cricket in 2011

On April 2, 2011, India, led by captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni, defeated Sri Lanka by six wickets (with 10 balls remaining) to win its second International Cricket Council (ICC) World Cup and its first since 1983. The final, held in front of an enthusiastic home crowd in Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium, brought to an end the 14-team tournament that began with India’s win over Bangladesh in the first match on February 19. (SeeSidebar.)

In Test cricket India, number one in the ICC ranking since December 2009, was comprehensively outplayed in a four-Test summer series against England, which rose to the top of the international Test rankings for the first time. England won 8 of its 12 Tests in 2010–11 (6 of them by an innings) and lost just one. Two of the other three were affected by rain. The long-dominant Australia slumped to fifth in the rankings.

England, ably led by Andrew Strauss and meticulously prepared by coach Andy Flower, demonstrated its dominance during the November 2010–January 2011 tour down under, beating Australia in Australia for the first time in 24 years to retain the Ashes (represented by the historic urn that symbolizes the oldest and fiercest cricketing rivalry). England won 3–1, with Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott the outstanding batsmen in the five-match series. In an unprecedented show of supremacy, all three England Test victories were achieved by the margin of an innings.

England’s long-awaited success was based more on excellent teamwork than individual brilliance. The players bowled and batted to a well-rehearsed plan and, like all great teams, always found someone to take responsibility in a crisis. Cook’s 766 runs (at an average of 127) was the fifth highest total for an Ashes series. His unbeaten 235 rescued England from a difficult position in the first Test in Brisbane and instilled confidence in the whole team. England’s nine centuries in the series were scored by six different batsmen; Australia mustered just three hundreds. James Anderson led the England bowling attack with 24 wickets (average 26.04), but Chris Tremlett, with 17 (23.35), and Tim Bresnan, with 11 (19.54), provided highly effective support as the Australian batsmen, with the exception of Mike Hussey (570 runs at 63.33), failed to match England’s skill and discipline.

Ricky Ponting, long the mainstay of Australia’s batting, had a miserable series and gave up the captaincy soon after the final comprehensive defeat in Sydney. After having leveled the series 1–1 with a victory in Perth, Australia collapsed to 98 all out on the opening day of the Fourth Test in Melbourne and could not recover. Unfortunately, Ponting, one of Australia’s greatest batsmen, was likely to be remembered as the captain who lost three Ashes series.

India began the 2010–11 season at home, sweeping Australia 2–0 and then defeating New Zealand 1–0, with two draws. A mark of India’s mental strength was a 1–1 draw in a three-Test series in South Africa against the hostile fast bowling of Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel. India lost the opening Test by an innings after a double century by Jacques Kallis but leveled the series in Durban. Another hard-fought win in the West Indies, with a depleted team, confirmed India’s resilience under Dhoni’s charismatic captaincy.

A confident Indian squad arrived in England in July 2011 but then lost all four Tests by wide margins, despite the consistent batting of Rahul Dravid. With its major batsmen, Sachin Tendulkar and V.V.S. Laxman, out of form and its main strike bowler, Zaheer Khan, suffering an injury early in the tour, India could not match a rampant England side in testing conditions. Kevin Pietersen (533 runs at 106.6) and Ian Bell (504 at 84.00) led the way for England, while the impeccable Dravid (461 at 76.83) upheld India’s cause virtually on his own. Tendulkar, seeking to become the first batsman to score 100 international centuries, failed to make any impact. Stuart Broad (25 wickets at 13.84) was England’s leading wicket taker. India’s players looked weary after a heavy schedule of competition in one-day cricket, and fears were again expressed by commentators and analysts about the future of Test cricket in a market dominated by one-day and Twenty20 cricket.

Michael Clarke replaced Ponting as Australia’s captain and recorded his first win in Sri Lanka, though the aftershocks of the Ashes defeat continued to rock Australian cricket. New Zealand captain Daniel Vettori resigned after an indifferent year. Sri Lanka, under its new captain, Tillakaratne Dilshan, was in a process of transformation after the retirement from the international game of Muttiah Muralitharan, the world’s best spin bowler. After renewed infighting between the Cricket Board and the players, Chris Gayle, the West Indian batsman and captain, was dropped from the Test series against both Pakistan and India. Meanwhile, Pakistan, which was struggling with an ongoing investigation into spot fixing by players in 2010 and still forced to play its “home” Tests in the U.A.E. because of political unrest, chose Misbah-ul-Haq to lead a young and talented side. One of the unnoticed highlights of the year was the return to Test cricket of Zimbabwe, which in August defeated Bangladesh in its first Test in six years. Hamilton Masakadza, one of a new generation of Zimbabwean cricketers, scored a century.

In domestic cricket in England, Lancashire won the county championship outright for the first time in 77 years with an unfashionably home-grown team, and Leicestershire, one of the smallest counties, defied the odds to win the T20 tournament. The Chennai Super Kings, led by Dhoni, won the Indian Premier League for the second time, beating Royal Challengers Bangalore in the final.

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